Charles University honors Alice Němcová Tejkalová with the Cori Prize for advancing equal opportunities

For the second year, Charles University has been recognizing individuals who contribute to equal opportunities through their work. The 2025 Carl and Gerty Cori Prize was also granted to Alice Němcová Tejkalová from the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. The award ceremony took place on 17 November, the Day of the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy and International Students’ Day, in the Great Hall of the Carolinum. Alice Němcová Tejkalová, researcher, journalist, and head of the Department of Journalism at ICSJ FSV UK has been dedicated to issues of equal opportunities for many years – in academia, journalism, and parasport.

For more than two decades, she has focused on equality for people with disabilities as well as gender equality. Alongside her journalistic and academic work, she has also been engaged in long-term volunteer activities. “It is a tremendous honor for me. Although the situation has significantly improved, equal opportunities in Czech society are still far from guaranteed. On my professional path, however, I have met many people who supported me and showed me that my efforts make sense. I try to do the same for those around me,” said Němcová Tejkalová, adding: “Thanks to the financial reward that comes with the award, I would like to take this work even further. I plan to support a student project or research focused on this topic – but I need to discuss with my colleagues at the faculty how we will do it.”

Overlooked topics

As a member of the Rector’s Collegium for Social Affairs from 2014 to 2018, she proposed a new employee benefit — so-called “kindergarten fees” — and successfully advocated for its introduction. She worked to increase the number of students with disabilities by improving the accessibility of university buildings. Under her leadership, the very first mapping of accessibility across Charles University buildings was carried out.

She moved the Carolina Centre from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics to the Rector’s Office, where it became the main advisory center for students with special needs. She also pushed for the reconstruction of the inadequate wheelchair entrance to the Carolinum and opened up the previously neglected issue of socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants and students. The Information, Advisory and Social Centre subsequently began not only mapping needs but also lending equipment. She also supported the establishment of a childcare group in the Hvězda dormitory within the Charles University Halls of Residence and Refectories. Until 2023, she served as a member of the Rector’s advisory body for students with special needs.

She was the first director of ICSJ FSV UK (2014–2018) and also the first female dean of FSV UK (2018–2022) in its history. Throughout her academic career, she has actively supported equal opportunities — she increased the representation of women on the Faculty’s Scientific Council, for example. She founded a Working Group for Identifying Potential Barriers to Women’s Career Development at the faculty, which was renamed the Working Group for Equal Opportunities in 2025. In 2023, she helped develop a successful training concept for women preparing for habilitation, focusing on work–life balance, and organized workshops — one of which was adopted for university-wide use in spring 2025. In the previous academic year, she implemented a comprehensive mentoring program for female academics in cooperation with Tomáš Poucha of the Mentoring Institute, the first of its kind at Charles University.

In recent years, she has built an all-female research team, which became the first female team at FSV UK to serve as co-investigators on a Horizon Europe project (Resilient Media for Democracy in the Digital Age). The team faced attacks on social media due to its composition but managed to use the attention to raise awareness of its research focus. In this context, Alice Němcová Tejkalová publicly highlighted existing prejudices against women scientists in society.

Advancing equality for people with disabilities

From February 2002 to August 2012, she co-produced the monthly Paralympic Magazine for Czech Television together with Jakub Bažant. She promoted parasport through other programmes as well — she provided commentary for recordings from the Paralympic Games, World and European Championships, and also for the first live broadcasts of para ice hockey. She was only the second woman ever employed as an editor in the history of Czech Television’s Sports Department, and the first woman to commentate a live hockey broadcast — the final of the Para Ice Hockey World Championships in Ostrava in 2009.

In 2005, she founded and until 2012 operated Handisport.cz, the first Czech news website dedicated to parasport. For her work, she received the 2013 Award of the Association for Applied Movement Activities and the 2023 Award of the Czech Paralympic Committee for her contribution to parasport. She has also long been involved in making public spaces more accessible for people with disabilities and parents with small children. For the NGO Asistence, which plays a significant role in removing barriers in Prague’s public transport system, she moderated public debates with politicians and helped popularize its activities. She also contributed to involving Charles University in the project We’re in This with You, in which public figures tried navigating the city in a wheelchair.

In 2021, she was appointed a member of the Czech Olympic Committee’s Commission for Equal Opportunities in Sport, and since 2022 she has served as its vice-chair. She helped create a manual for equal and respectful representation of sportswomen and sportsmen, and based on it organized a series of debates at Charles University, Masaryk University and Palacký University. She also contributed to the preparation of the Czech Olympic Committee’s first Action Plan to support gender equality in sport and sports leadership, which promotes greater representation of women in leadership and decision-making roles within sports organizations.

The “Other” Athletes

She has been researching parasport since her student years. Her master’s thesis, which she defended with the dean’s commendation in 2005, focused on the media representation of sports for people with disabilities from 1992 to 2004. Her doctoral dissertation examined the stereotypical portrayal and framing of disability sport in Czech daily newspapers between 1948 and 2008. In 2012, her book The Other Athletes was published, exploring the transformation of stereotypes and framing of athletes with disabilities in Czechoslovak and Czech print media.

Her research also addresses topics such as racism in sport, the representation of women’s sport in the media, and stereotypes and biases against female athletes. Her academic standing is further demonstrated by an invitation from world-renowned scholars Andrew Billings and Marie Hardin to contribute a chapter on parasport, both in the Czech and global context, to the Routledge Handbook of Sports and Social Media (published in April 2025). She invited two of her former PhD students to collaborate on the chapter, thereby supporting their ongoing professional development.